When John Blakey joined me on Corey-osity Unleashed, one of his ideas stuck with me. Your team spots a purpose imposter a mile away.
He's right. And I'd go further. A leader who fakes purpose does more damage than a leader who never mentions it.
The indifferent boss is at least honest. Everyone knows the deal. You come in, you do the work, you get paid. Nobody feels lied to.
The purpose imposter breaks a promise every single day. And every person on the team keeps score.
What a Purpose Imposter Looks Like
You've met one. You've worked for one. You've been one on a bad week, too. I know I have.
The imposter talks about mission at the all-hands, then cancels the one-on-ones. The values deck says "people first," then the reorg lands on a Friday afternoon by email. The CEO letter celebrates the charity partnership while the support team works unpaid overtime to hit a ticket target.
None of it is illegal. Most of it isn't even malicious. It's a gap between the words and the work.
And the gap is the problem. Your people don't judge you by the poster. They judge you by the distance between the poster and Tuesday.
Your People Feel the Gap. The Research Agrees.
Researchers have studied this gap for over twenty years, and the findings are blunt.
Hypocrisy wears people out
A team of German researchers led by Sarah Scheidler published a paper in the Journal of Business Ethics with a title I love: Scrooge Posing as Mother Teresa. They looked at companies investing more in outward-facing good works (philanthropy, community programs) than in how they treat their own staff.
In the first study, they surveyed 3,410 employees across industries. When a company's external do-gooding outran its care for its own people, employees saw it as hypocrisy. The perceived hypocrisy drove emotional exhaustion. Exhaustion drove people to plan their exit.
The second study used secondary data on 1,902 firms. Same pattern, but this time with real turnover, not intentions. Inconsistent strategies pushed actual employee turnover up.
Read it again. The charity work didn't buy goodwill. It made the internal neglect worse, because now your people had a comparison point.
I'm not sure about this part: whether a company doing no outward good works at all fares better than the hypocritical one. The abstract compares consistent and inconsistent strategies, and I wasn't able to read the full paper to confirm a head-to-head with pure indifference.
Word and deed show up in the profit line
Tony Simons at Cornell gave this gap a name: behavioral integrity. I wrote about his work when I told you to stop reading the innovation speech. The part I didn't cover was the money.
In 2002, Simons and his colleagues surveyed more than 6,500 employees at 76 Holiday Inn hotels across the US and Canada. Staff rated their managers on statements like "My manager delivers on promises" and "My manager practices what he or she preaches."
A one-eighth point improvement on a five-point scale lined up with a 2.5% rise in profit as a share of revenue. For an average hotel, more than $250,000 a year.
Simons told Cornell's news office no other manager behavior his team measured had as large an impact on profits.
Not pay. Not perks. Not the mission statement. Whether the boss did what the boss said.
Purpose on its own does nothing for the numbers
Here's the one which surprised me most.
Claudine Gartenberg, Andrea Prat and George Serafeim built a measure of corporate purpose from roughly 500,000 survey responses from US workers. Their first finding: purpose, as employees perceived it, was not related to financial performance.
Purpose alone did nothing.
The firms which pulled ahead had two things together: high purpose and high clarity from management about how to get there. Those firms showed better future accounting and stock market performance, even after controlling for where they started.
And the signal came from middle managers and professional staff. Not the executives. Not the people writing the purpose statement. The people stuck between the statement and the work.
So the purpose statement is worth nothing on its own. The discipline to make it real is worth a lot. Blakey makes the same point... a grand purpose statement is useless without discipline. I covered the discipline side in Purpose Isn't a Feeling. It's a Practice.
The Wells Fargo Lesson
If you want the textbook purpose imposter, look at Wells Fargo.
The bank's vision statement read: "We want to satisfy our customers' financial needs and help them succeed financially." Lovely words.
Meanwhile, branch staff worked under aggressive cross-selling targets. The push for eight products per customer had its own slogan: "Going for Gr-Eight." Regulators found employees had opened around 1.5 million unauthorized deposit accounts and over 565,000 unauthorized credit card accounts between 2011 and 2016. The bank paid $185 million in fines in 2016. It fired roughly 5,300 employees along the way. The CEO resigned a month after the fines landed.
Every one of those branch employees knew the vision statement. Every one of them knew the targets. When the two disagreed, the targets won. The staff learned the lesson leadership was teaching, and the lesson was not the one on the wall.
Why Faking It Hurts More Than Ignoring It
I've thought about why the imposter does more harm than the indifferent boss. Three reasons keep coming back.
It raises the stakes on every broken promise. The indifferent boss promised nothing. When they cut training, nobody's surprised. When the purpose boss cuts training after a speech about "investing in our people," it lands as betrayal.
It teaches people to ignore you. Once your team learns your words don't predict your actions, they stop listening to the words. Then the next time you need them to believe something true, they won't.
It makes your best people complicit. Wells Fargo staff had to choose between the vision and the job. Good people in this position either leave or stop caring. Neither helps you.
My research for Step It Up HR found 99.5% of people have had at least one bad boss. I'd bet a big chunk of those bosses had a values slide.
How to Stop Being the Imposter
You don't fix this with a better statement. You fix it by closing the gap. Here's what I'd do.
Write down three promises, not thirty values
Pick three specific things your purpose commits you to doing. Not "we value people." Something like "every engineer gets a one-on-one every two weeks, and it never gets cancelled." Something your team checks.
Ask the middle
Gartenberg's data says middle managers carry the signal. So ask them. "Where does what we say differ from what we do?" Then sit quiet and take notes. Don't defend. Don't explain.
Fix the inside before the outside
If you're about to announce a community initiative, check your own house first. Scheidler's findings say outward good works on top of inward neglect make things worse. Pay people fairly, give them reasonable workloads, then go save the world. I wrote about where this goes wrong in The B Corp Dividend Is Real. The Badge Isn't What Pays It.
Check your targets against your words
Pull up your team's KPIs. Put them next to your purpose statement. If hitting the KPIs rewards behavior your purpose forbids, your purpose loses. Every time. Change the KPIs or change the statement.
Say less
Sometimes the honest move is to talk about purpose less until your actions catch up. Your team will notice the deeds long before they notice the silence.
The Question to Ask Yourself
Blakey's book Force for Good is about leaders who put purpose first and mean it. I've written before about whose purpose you're feeding. This post is the uncomfortable sequel.
Here's the test. If your team wrote your purpose statement based only on what they watched you do last month, what would it say?
If the answer doesn't match the poster, take the poster down. Or start doing what it says.